


Song of Songs

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Childhood Memories, F/M, Falling In Love, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Growing Old, Growing Old Together, Loss, Love, Memories, Miscarriage, Reverse Chronology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 11:23:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6655933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It begins at the end, when the man buys flowers. It ends there too. The beginnings, all of them, seem like they're over in a heartbeat. Emily only wishes she'd had more time to appreciate the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Song of Songs

**Author's Note:**

> "1 I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys. 2 As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. 3 As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow with great delight, and his fruit was sweet to my taste."
> 
> _Song of Songs 2:1-3_

The man buys flowers.

On Tuesday he brings her roses. She loves and hates them equally. They’re bland in his expressive hands. White and red and a single yellow rose; all of them clipped at the stems, all of their thorns shorn off. They’re safe, plain, dull. Everything he’s never once been.

When he leaves, she puts her hand to the yellow rose’s stem and finds a single forgotten thorn. It doesn’t catch on her skin, but she remembers the sensation of pain.

On Wednesday he brings rue and aloe. They’re stranger than the roses. They’re more him. They come in brittle plastic pots that grow grubby on the sides where he hasn’t cleaned the sticky residue of the supermarket price tags away. She puzzles over them. There’s something she’s missing here, some message he’s leaving, but as usual she can’t follow his meaning.

He doesn’t come for what feels like a week after that.

On Monday he brings white clover and a bell-shaped flower with thin purple petals. He takes the other plants away. He’s dressed in a coat and the purple scarf she’d once brought him, a lifetime ago. When she came to this place, it was summer.

She knows this message.

It’s one he’s told her before.

 

* * *

 

One day, he doesn’t come and she begins to walk. At first the world around her doesn’t change. There’s grass, sun and a whistling wind. Then it fades. It becomes familiar, and new, all at once.

She finds herself standing beside him as he once was, and he’s standing by her bed before the end.

He doesn’t seem to see her. His entire focus has narrowed to the hospital bed and the withered woman within. He’s so _alive_ in that moment that she wonders how she could have ever thought he’d grown old. One of his hands holds the slack hand of the woman dying. Some part of her knows it’s her; her at the moment of the oldest she’ll ever be. Some part of her knows how this ends: with flowers and soundless messages and a purple scarf.

She takes his other hand and holds it tight. He doesn’t feel her. And then he’s alone.

 

* * *

 

Towards the end, there were more ghosts than living souls in their hearts and their memories.

Towards the end, everything grew emptier. She would sit and think about the past, but it felt faded. Somehow less. As though in the act of growing older, as those she knew grew older also and left this life, her memories had been weakened. Maybe that was why sometimes she forgot to turn the stove off or where she’d left her keys. She alone was responsible for the memories now, the others gone. She had to remember for them now they couldn’t. She didn’t have time for the mundane things.

His memory never faded.

Always sharp. Always clever. That never changed.

She went for a walk one evening because the night was brisk and she’d always loved the cold. The air turned her hands pink and dried her lips. He found her on the shore of the river they’d lived by for ten years now. She’s by that river now, watching the woman with her dark hair and dark eyes both turning dull. She’s waiting for him, because she knows he’ll be here soon to lead her home, like he always has. A thump of feet and he’s there, pale and frightened, his hair as wild as ever even though it’s grey now instead of brown. She can see the shade of who he once was in his eyes, the spark still there.

“I went for a walk,” she explains, reaching for his hand. His fingers shake. Why had she gone for a walk?

She doesn’t remember now. She watches them, this couple from before, as though she’s stepped away from the grassy grounds where the man in his long coat and purple scarf still brings her flowers and into a place where the past is still vivid. And she sees what they had looked like on the outside. Old. Frail.

Together. Not alone at all. She’d been a fool. As they walk away from her, from that shore, they hold hands and she sees the ghosts of their family by their sides.

And now he’s the only one left to remember.

 

* * *

 

She gets to see the quiet moments. She’s walking backwards through their lives, seeing it all. Seeing the laughter. Seeing the smiles. The moments when they’d been nothing but happy. Retirement and the boredom it had brought until the day he’d brought home a teetering pile of second-hand puzzles and they’d spent the next three days arguing over noses and ears. Dinners and lunches and endless coffees with the people who become the fabric of their lives. JJ, who lives still but so far away, and her blonde hair that has never darkened or faded. Henry and Michael, who’ve grown so big and have their own families now. Hotch who’d gone second. Jack, who grieves him dearly even as he holds his own son’s hand. Rossi, the first. She’s almost glad of this. He’d never buried any of them.

She watches them die and then, almost like magic, she watches them live again. With every step she takes, they grow younger, more alive, more distant from the moments of their deaths. Lines from their faces fade.

It seems impossible that now all this is ended.

 

* * *

 

“Come to the beach,” he says suddenly, stepping into the room with his hair peppered grey and grinning so widely in her direction that she thinks for a moment that he’s talking to her. Then she turns and finds herself sprawled on the bed, feet bare and shirt undone, her skin old but smooth and smile only barely lined.

“Sunlight?” she teases, lowering the book. “Surely you can’t be serious?” And he laughs and grabs her hands, pulling her upright. Pulls her from the room, still barefoot, still laughing.

She remembers this day. He with his pants rolled up to his knees, falling over in the waves. She savouring the hot sand between their toes. Sitting on the car after as he licks ice-cream from between his fingers, trying to stop it from dripping down his salty skin onto his wedding band. She’d called him a child.

He’d taken it as a compliment.

She remembers.

 

* * *

 

She thinks at first that she’s back by her grave, but this grass is different. The sun is different. The man is the same, and he carries aloe.

She knows what he’s doing. Every year, he visits the grave of his mother, alone. And every year, he plants a fresh sprig of the jagged succulent atop her grave, to replace the one of the year before. They never thrive, not even in the Nevada sun.

“Why aloe?” she’d asked him once, sitting in the car with the radio humming and the window wound down, waiting for him to re-join her. He’d picked the price tag off the pot as he’d answered.

“Grief,” he’d murmured, talking more to the pot than her. “It’s… grief.”

And every year, he left the same message.

It never changed. It never hurt less.

 

* * *

 

She’d retired first. She remembered the glum faces of her team at Interpol. She remembered how damn happy everyone had been at home, even though they’d tried to hide it. Fifteen years long distance of a twenty-one year marriage at that point… they’d been apart longer than they’d been together. But she came home. And he was still there, still waiting. When he’d retired, he’d been the last of their original team to do so. And they were happy, of course, but they were sad too, because something was ending.

She watches them dance and smiles, because she knows they have life left to live beyond the BAU, and their friends still surround them.

 

* * *

 

She watches their second child be born. The room is silent. Everyone there knows.

She watches that second child be buried.

She knows there’ll be a third, unplanned, unwanted, grieved dearly. She knows the third will join her siblings in beating her parents to the ground. She knows. She remembers. She wishes she didn’t.

She follows him as he leaves her one night and drives to the bar. She watches him as he drinks and tries to forget, and wishes she could tell him he never will. She watches as he calls Hotch with fumbling hands and their boss comes and takes him away. She thinks of following, but when her husband leans against the car and begins to cry, she walks away. His sobs become muffled as Hotch pulls him close and holds him together while he falls apart.

She grieves again because she’s been at the end, and they’re not there waiting for her.

 

* * *

 

They fought sometimes. Of course they did; they were both stubborn and arrogant and entirely sure of their own intelligence.

Well. She was. He was just stubborn.

And she was always the crueller one when they fought, but he always had the last word. She watches them snap and snarl and she watches him storm out. He’ll cool off at JJ’s or maybe he’ll drive to Morgan’s, an hour away, but Hank is growing up and he’s always happy to see him. He’ll come home smiling.

He brings her a pot of rue and she smiles at the way the unnamed grey-furred cat that haunts their fire escape turns up his nose at the bluish leaves. She misses Sergio.

“Rue means regret,” he says cheerfully, tucking it on the outside of the sill. “And repentance and sorrow and basically, I’m really sorry.”

“You need to stop reading books on flowers,” she replies, kissing his cheek and feeling him smile. “Every time I come home, you’ve gotten odder.”

He tucks a cutting of it by her ear as he replies, the leaves bitter smelling. “I’m always odd.”

She buys him the purple scarf. It’s not as floral as his apology, but he understands. He never wears another.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t want to see this. She doesn’t want to remember.

She wants to be back in the grass and the sun, by his side as he tries to talk to her using the language of supermarket flowers, still wet from the greasy water they’ve been sitting in on the shelf. But she doesn’t know how to go back. And she watches, again, as their first child became a possibility and a certainty and, finally, a memory.

She’s young and strong in that bed, but she looks neither, and she watches as he stands by her side holding the body of the son they’d carried but never known. He can almost support him with one hand. So small, too small; she’d refused to take the child or to speak of it after. They’d grieved apart.

“Never again,” she’d cried, the pain and the grief speaking in her voice.

“Okay,” he’d replied, and turned away. The woman in the bed, the woman she’d once been, hadn’t seen his expression. But she does.

She sees the tears.

And she wishes she’d held him then, when she was more than just the ghost of a memory.

 

* * *

 

She’s standing behind his chair and he’s twenty-six years old.

She walks in, holding Sergio in her arms. “Do you want to get married?” she asks, tilting her head and staring at him, and he looks up from his letter. Blinks. Half smiles, as though his brain is tripping over itself.

“Err,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. He leaves a lock flicked upwards at an annoyingly sharp angle from his head, and she reaches a faint hand down to ineffectively brush at it even as the younger her smirks. “Okay?”

They don’t have roses at the ceremony because he says they’re boring. Instead, he hands her a purple bellflower in a tumble of white clover, and wordlessly promises her unwavering love.

He always kept his promises.

 

* * *

 

Falling in love, something so huge, happens in the blink of an eye. Three steps. That’s all it takes to take the her of the past from casually indifferent to loyal friend to unswerving lover. Their first time is rushed and awkward; he accidentally elbows her in her nose and she sneezes half-way through. They spent most of it laughing and they make a mess on her expensive sheets, but they never regret it.

They have a lifetime more.

 

* * *

 

She meets him again, for the first time.

“Hi,” he says, shy and young and so fucking sweet, even back then, that it hurts. “Welcome to the team.” There’s a book in his hands, _The Language of Flowers_ , and she’d thought then that it looked boring.

She wishes now that she’d read it.

“He’s very odd,” she’d told JJ after, a little weirded out by the too-smart man in his cardigans and neatly pressed slacks. JJ had laughed and laughed. Her ghost laughs too, because she’d had _no_ idea just how odd, or how important.

 

* * *

 

They meet and then she takes another step and she’s watching herself before it all; as skinny and wild as a newborn colt and just as skittish. She watches herself screw up again and again and she sees her mother crying for her all over again.

She wishes she could do it all again, just this moment, because she’d thought that Elizabeth had hated her, and instead now she knows that she’d loved her too much.

There’s something so painful about failing to reach your children, no matter how hard you try, and she wishes she’d been given the chance to try with her own.

 

* * *

 

She finds him as a teenager and he’s alone. He’s sitting in a lecture, only half paying attention, and his whole page is covered in tiny, cramped handwriting. He smiles at a girl and she looks away. He doesn’t seem to care. When he picks up his bag and goes to walk away, she stays until the world changes around her again.

She sits with him as he watches his mother being led away and she finds him again six years earlier as he hides from a group of boys with his bag and wearing heavy boots. He’s trembling against her side and they don’t find him, and she wishes he knew she was there. But he doesn’t and eventually, as the streetlights flicker on, he sneaks home.

She follows until she loses him in the gloom of twilight as the sun threatens to set on them.

 

* * *

 

“What are you going to make of yourself?” her mother snaps to a version of her who barely reaches her ghost’s elbow. She’s scowling, furious, and there’s mud on her nose. She wants to grab her and swing her around and to tell her that there’s nothing wrong with being eleven and dirty; to enjoy it while she can.

“Who cares?” eleven-year-old Emily says, and gets sent to her room.

“It’s okay you’ve made a mess,” the older her tells herself, as they both look down at muddy footprints on the white carpet they weren’t supposed to walk on. “That’s what life is. And it gets so much better.” She’s telling herself what she wishes she could have told their daughters.

But she doesn’t hear her either.

 

* * *

 

He’s seven and his father is mad.

“Why can’t you be _normal,_ Spencer?” the man says, and closes a door between them. Spencer sits on his neatly made bed swinging his feet and swiping viciously at tears that brim in his eyes. Emily has never known this Spencer, but she aches for him. In him she sees their son and their daughters and the paths they could have taken.

“I am normal,” he says to his shoes, his voice thick with tears.

“No you’re not,” she says, closing her eyes. “But that’s okay.”

And when she opens them, he’s looking back at her and smiling.

 

* * *

 

They’re back at the grass and when he takes her hand, she can feel the cool touch of his skin and the pulse that hammers in his wrist.

“Took your time getting here,” she says, and that’s true, because it’s taken them both a lifetime to reach this moment. There’s tears on her cheeks, just like there had been on his when he was seven-years old. She’s not ashamed because if he’s here, the last of them has fallen. That’s a damn good reason to cry.

“Really?” he says, shaking brown hair out of his eyes. Young again. “Because I remember all of it, and it feels like it only took a moment.”

She laughs. “I can prove it, genius.”

And she does.

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited August, 2017.**


End file.
